Providing insulation and thermal protection to pipes and conduits throughout industrial facilities is often important to maintain efficiency in material transfer and safety to the workers in the facilities. There are a plethora of areas and industries where pipes, tanks, and other structures need to be protected and insulated including those found in the petrochemical, oil, and gas industries to suggest but a few.
For insulation and thermal protection, the industry standard is generally to use a mineral wool wrap to cover the pipe or other object being insulated and then provide a metal cladding over the top of the insulation wrapping to hold the insulation in place. The process of wrapping and then cladding the pipe or other object is very time and labor intensive and, because of these considerations, such wrapping and cladding process is somewhat costly. Conventional spray insulation products are generally unsuitable for insulating and weather protection to pipes and other objects because existing spray products are generally designed for application to or within a defined cavity to be effective and to hold its final shape. Applying conventional spray insulation products to a pipe typically does not result in the material providing an effective weather and insulation coating.
Many pipes that are wrapped in the mineral wool and then clad in metal are located outside of a facility's walls and are, thus, exposed to a variety of different temperature and weather conditions, such as rain, snow, humidity, moisture, debris, and the like. Because the mineral wool, which is used to insulate the piping is porous and because the cladding typically does not cover the entire mineral wool wrap or can otherwise have areas exposed to the surroundings, environmental exposure to debris and moisture causes unwanted decreases to the insulation properties of the mineral wool as well as deterioration of the underlying pipe itself due to possible moisture penetration. The deterioration of the pipe due to unwanted water penetration, called Corrosion Under Insulation (or CUI), is an undesired problem as CUI is a relatively major expense at many industrial facilities in terms of both maintenance and part replacement.
Prior attempts to address the issues mentioned herein with mineral wool insulation have been through a coating that can be applied to pipes to provide the insulation and thermal protective properties while also being relatively non-porous and preventing exposure of the pipes to moisture. Prior coating products are typically water-based and must be applied in relatively thin coats onto a hot surface (such as about 190° F. to about 210° F. or about 200° F.) for the coatings to properly adhere to the pipes. As the products are water based, the water must be removed to form the final product, which can cause challenges in maintaining a uniform coating on the pipe or other object as the coating is dried, which can be hindered by high ambient humidity levels. Further, existing products generally require thin, multiple coats to achieve the thickness required to provide adequate insulation and thermal protective properties to the pipes, thus causing the application of this insulation to be just as, if not more, labor intensive than wrapping and cladding traditional mineral wool.